Microsoft has agreed to pay a Californian woman $10,000 (£7,500) after an automatic Windows 10 update left her computer unusable.Teri Goldstein said her Windows 7 computer had automatically tried to update itself to Windows 10 without her permission. She said the update had made her machine unstable, leaving her unable to use it to run her business. Microsoft said it had dropped its appeal to save on legal costs.

Microsoft has been aggressively pushing the latest version of its widely used operating system, which is currently available as a free download for computers running Windows 7 and 8However, many people have chosen not to upgrade, because they are running old hardware, have software that does not run on Windows 10, are concerned over the software's tracking features, or simply do not want it.

Those that purchase a new machine might well enjoy the "being spied on" experience that Win10 brings to the table in its efforts to copy some of apples "always-backed-up" features but the downside is that all of your data is likely duplicated in the cloud somewhere just waiting for some judge to sign a wide ranging order that allows a Govt to trawl through it, I myself wish to continue to make usage of some of my older software, I have after all no wish to break programs that still work perfectly if not better than the newer offerings, what part of that have they not understood at MS ?

If they want to avoid this sort of madness occurring make it easier for folks to use an MS virtual machine system to run their older software on and complaints will doubtless drop, or they could go one trashing machines and driving folks to mainstream Linux systems, they need to face this instead rushing head first into monetising their apple copy app platform and disregarding the consequences.